sea, or the English succeeded in the complete reduction
of the island, the misery of its after ages might have been avoided. A
struggle such as that in which Scotland drove out its conquerors might have
produced a spirit of patriotism and national union which would have formed
a people out of the mass of warring clans. A conquest such as that in which
the Normans made England their own would have spread at any rate the law,
the order, the civilization of the conquering country over the length and
breadth of the conquered. Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to effect its
entire deliverance, was strong enough to hold its assailants partially at
bay. The country was broken into two halves whose conflict has never
ceased. So far from either giving elements of civilization or good
government to the other, conqueror and conquered reaped only degradation
from the ceaseless conflict. The native tribes lost whatever tendency to
union or social progress had survived the invasion of the Danes. Their
barbarism was intensified by their hatred of the more civilized intruders.
But these intruders themselves, penned within the narrow limits of the
Pale, brutalized by a merciless conflict, cut off from contact with the
refining influences of a larger world, sank rapidly to the level of the
barbarism about them: and the lawlessness, the ferocity, the narrowness of
feudalism broke out unchecked in this horde of adventurers who held the
land by their sword.

[Sidenote: English and Irish]

From the first the story of the English Pale was a story of degradation and
anarchy. It needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army stormed its
strongholds and drove its leading barons into exile, to preserve even their
fealty to the English Crown. John divided the Pale into counties and
ordered the observance of the English law; but the departure of his army
was the signal for a return of the disorder he had trampled under foot.
Between Englishmen and Irishmen went on a ceaseless and pitiless war. Every
Irishman without the Pale was counted by the English settlers an enemy and
a robber whose murder found no cognizance or punishment at the hands of the
law. Half the subsistence of the English barons was drawn from forays
across the border, and these forays were avenged by incursions of native
marauders which carried havoc at times to the very walls of Dublin. Within
the Pale itself the misery was hardly less. The English settlers were
harried and opp